I love baking bread, but I love my family more. Bread is complex, despite it’s seemingly short list of ingredients. Starters, fermenting, rising, proofing, there’s a whole lexicon of jargon that comes with baking bread, but I’d more than say that end result is worth it, provided you like bread to begin with. In my family, my mother is the biggest fan of enriched breads. In addition to her wicked sweet tooth, she is a sucker for challah, Hawaiian rolls, Chinese bakery pastries, and the like.

I’ll keep this post short because I don’t want my words to get windy, like the braids of this challah. To sum up my thoughts in a nutshell, I miss home and family. I’m loving college, of course. Seeing friends from high school, meeting new ones, but there’s no doubt that I miss my mom, dad, and sister. Love you guys.

Can you guys guess what I did before college? I finished a juice fast! People do juice fasts for different reasons. Some people want to lose weight and lose it fast. Some people want to clean our their urinary tract. Or colon. Or something. For me, I decided to do one because I’ve never done on before (and you guys know how I like to try new things) and because college, for me, starts in exactly a week and I wanted to start my year at a high point (from a health-oriented perspective). It’s a bit of a stereotype that all college students live off of packaged ramen and frozen waffles, but realistically speaking I see my next four years to be full of cups of yogurt, boxes of candy, and my personal weakness. Don’t ask to explain why, because I couldn’t even, but I love those things.

Anyways, my inspiration for this detox/juice fast came from Lady Cakes. She drew her own inspiration from this cleanse, which is pretty cool if expensive, expensive, too expensive for this soon-to-be-broke-student! Even though Ashlae didn’t have a stellar experience with her own cleanse, I still really liked it for several reasons. First, it’s not all “LOSE WEIGHT! WE’RE GONNA LOSE SOME WEIGHT Y’ALL!” Some of those crazy cleanses are like: ‘Mix lemon juice, hot sauce, and maple syrup together. Drink this and only this for a week.’ Um, that’s gross. BPC’s cleanse is more focused on balancing your innards while providing you with good (and raw) nutrients.

Secondly, it’s all delicious. I modeled my self-made juices on BPC’s ‘Foundation’ cleanse. I loved their description of what kind of person it’s for, because I felt like my thoughts had been plagiarized for a moment. It’s been labelled as ‘the cleanse for foodies’ and I would jump on that bandwagon because of the four juices, none of them made me think ‘Blech!’.

Speaking of, the four juices in my cleanse were: Green Juice, Pineapple Apple Mint, Spicy Lemonade, and Almond Milk. The original cleanse ends with a cashew milk, but I didn’t have cashews at home so almond milk it was! Taste-wise, I love how the use of Granny Smith apples in the Green Juice cut through the vegetables so it wasn’t overwhelmingly vegetable-y at all. After my first, mind-blowingly delicious, bottle of P.A.M. I was hesitant about how the Green Juice would taste afterwards, but it wasn’t even a little bad!

I’ve been seeing a lot of banana soft serve/healthy banana ice cream type posts going around the blogosphere lately. I don’t know whether this year blended, frozen bananas are really in or whether this happens even summer, but this recipe has no bananas in it. First of all…I haven’t been feeling bananas that much lately. Sure, I still dig a moist, cinnamony banana bread, but when picking out of the fruit bowl, banana has been coming last to all the exotic-erfruits we’ve had lately. (Sorry, buddy.)

You know when you go into a store to buy a shower caddy and you come out with a kitchen scale and plastic, eco-friendly mug instead? Oh…that doesn’t happen to you? Well, I lose my trains of thought way more than a normal person should, maybe I should get tested for ADD, I wonder what raw eggplant tastes like a lot.

A long, long, long while back I found this recipe that looked to me like a healthier and delightfully cheesy version of a fry. Naturally it took me forever to get my hands on parsnips, and when I did, I realized I hadn’t planned far enough ahead and I was lacking in both rosemary and parmesan cheese. But has lacking ingredients ever stopped me before? Nay!

As I mentioned in the last post, the produce here in Georgia is quite marvelous. The proximity to Florida means that ruby red grapefruits are actually ruby red and figs costs way less than they could ever in the Northeast. My mum has always had a Chinese saying that she applies to me that roughly translates to “large eyes, small stomach”. In a nutshell this means that, as I’ve mentioned before, I buy more than I can usually manage to eat.

My family has recently moved to a suburb outside of Atlanta. It’s a quaintly named Peachtree City, but so is everything else in the state of Georgia. Driving through Atlanta is a bit of a mess because you can easily turn wrongly onto Peachtree Street when you were aiming for Peachtree Parkway. Driving around at night sort of feels like you’re in a horror movie. There are no streetlights, all the roads are hedged by trees, and everything is so windy!

In case you can’t tell, I’m missing home.

I miss everything about Buffalo. I miss the comfortable summers, I miss the logical grid-like layout of streets, and most of all I miss the Vitamin D-deficiency induced lethargy of the people in ‘the drinking city with a sports problem’. (I’ve yet to get used to how nice people are in the south.) Being away from New York has really brought me to appreciate everything that it has. I miss the dairy farms of Upstate, the water of the Great Lakes (it costs buttloads here, guys), and being able to go out at midnight with friends, roam around Wegmans and share a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the parking lot.